Richard C. Longworth, senior fellow at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, contributes his knowledge and ideas about issues that affect the Midwest.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Who Cares?

I spoke last week to some of Chicago's brightest young people -- business folk, academics, an architect, a government type or two -- picked for a program for the city's future leaders. My subject was the Midwest and its response to globalization: in other words, if Chicago is the capital of the Midwest, how goes its inland nation? Too much of the Midwest, I told them, is coping badly with globalization. In fact, some of its big cities (Detroit, Cleveland) and old factory towns (Rockford, Muncie, Lima, Flint) might not make it. If they don't reinvent themselves, I said, they may be doomed to keep sliding into impoverished backwaters. A lot of old farm towns are already there and also might not come back.

Nobody seemed happy about this news. But some of these young people had a question: so what? Why should we care? Throughout history, towns and cities have come and gone. If Muncie goes, why should anyone in Chicago care? If Detroit keeps crumbling, should we do anything about it? More to the point, should we be expected to do anything about it? In a world of limited economic resources, why should we even consider spending some of those resources on places that have lost their economic purpose and show no sign of finding a new one? The Midwest's future, they said, depends on the strength of its winners -- Chicago, Minneapolis, Columbus, Madison, Ann Arbor -- not on succoring its losers.

So if yesterday's cities vanish, why should tomorrow's leaders care?

A good question that deserves an answer, and I'm not sure I've got one. But at the least, we can talk about it a bit, and see if anyone can give a good reason.

We've been here before. Back in 1987, an academic couple named Frank and Deborah Popper noted that a great swatch of the Great Plains was drying out and emptying out, without too few people to be considered inhabited. Turn it back to the bison, the Poppers said, urging that some 140,000 square miles be designated a Buffalo Commons.

Not surprisingly, the Poppers were vilified by Dakotans and Kansans who insisted that there still was civilization out there. But in the years since, the population and the acquifers have continued to fall. Even some people who hated the Poppers' idea concede now that it might make sense.

But still, what do you do with the folks out there? Some of the nation's most unpopulated (and poorest) counties are in Buffalo Commons territory. One of them is Arthur County in Nebraska which has about 450 people scattered across 718 miles.

I talked once about this with Ted Kooser, the Nebraskan and former American poet laureate who lives near the state capital of Lincoln.

"There's a sign in Arthur that reads 'Vote for Helen for Mayor,'" Kooser said. "You don't want to save these towns just for sentimental reasons. But in Arthur, there's something there that's worth something to somebody. Somebody will move in. So it's never going to be vaporized. But saving them? Let's say Arthur has a water tower and the well goes bad and there's only three families there. They can't get the resources to fix it. So should we try?

"There are people in those places. What do we do about them?"

Not to compare little Arthur with Detroit, which has 900,000 people, or Cleveland, which has 430,000. Let's get serious. Neither Detroit nor Cleveland will vanish. Both still have too much political clout and historical importance to be ignored.

But like Arthur, both have fewer than half as many people as they once did. Like Arthur, both probably have better pasts than futures. Once, they were two of America's richest cities. Once, they meant a lot to this country. But unless things turn around, that day is past.

Members of a younger generation ask, why should we care? They care about the future. They want to put our money into education and innovation and infrastructure for the cities where they're going to live and work.

A young woman in this group came from Buffalo. I asked what's she doing in Chicago. There's life and jobs here, she said. Would she ever go back to Buffalo? Only if you dragged me, she said. If she wants to put her tax dollars to work, she thinks they should go here, not to a dying city up on Lake Erie.

This sounds hard-hearted. But it's the real condundrum facing much of the Midwest.

Between Arthur and Detroit are dozens, probably hundreds, of smaller towns, old factory towns, that have lost the mills and the industries that were their original reason for existence and sustained them for a century. These are places like Galesburg or Muncie or Lima or Flint. Every Midwestern state has them and is spending millions in welfare and other benefits to keep them going.

Some of these towns will certainly live and may even thrive again. A new factory may locate there. More likely, a local entrepreneur will set up the business that saves the town. Just because a place is down doesn't mean it can't come back.

But some other of these towns will certain keep declining. The industrial age needed all these towns. The global era doesn't. Without an economic raison d'etre, no place can keep going forever.

The Midwest is dotted with old ghost towns, places that declined over the years and eventually disappeared. Sad but true. They probably could have been saved, but at what cost?

Now the Midwest is creating a new generation of industrial ghost towns. I guess they all could be propped up, but at what cost?

Ohio seems to have more of these places than most states. I asked some state officials in Ohio what they should do about the people there. They said, seriously, that the best thing they could do is to encourge these peope, even subsidize them, to leave.

The fact is that if these towns are going to be saved, they have to save themselves. No one else is going to do it for them. They can petition the state government, which has more demands on less money every year. They can lean on their Congressmen, even as their population and hence their congressional representation erodes. This way, they'll get enough to hold on to their past but not enough to build their future.

Most of these places already have three strikes against them. They've lost their best young people, like the woman from Buffalo, because there's nothing to keep them there. Schools, dependent on declining property taxes, are generally substandard. Infrastructure crumbles, and there's no money to fix it. The local leaders often are relics from the industrial age who hope they'll die before their town does.

Some towns already are buckling down. Places like Flint, Michigan, and Youngstown, Ohio, have adopted the "shrinking city" concept, cutting back on area and services, concentrating on being decent small 21st century towns instead of big, powerful 20th-century manufacturing cities. Akron and Grand Rapids are reinventing themselves with new industries. Other places are tapping into local colleges or community colleges for ideas.

Good luck to them. All have value. All are civilizations unto themselves. All have residents who care about their town. But they're on their own. The future depends totally on these residents, not on an outside world that doesn't care.

In southern Iowa is a little town called Gravity. It once had more than 1,000 people, a school, a busy main street, nice houses. Now it has about 200 people, and nothing else. Gravity is dying.

Gravity's town slogan, proclaimed on a sign in an overgrown park, is pretty grim: "If Gravity goes, we all go."

Muncie may have the third largest state university, but that's about all it has. I know, I graduated from Ball State in 2004. the problem is, Ball State and Muncie don't have much to do with each other, and both seem to like it that way. rather than leveraging the presence of a big state institution, the city seems to resent having "all those damn kids" hanging around. the students resent having to spend any time in such an abandoned place as Muncie, generally preferring to go home or to Indy or Ft. Wayne for the weekends. BSU does not have the biomedical or engineering programs which attract the R&D dollars and professionals that IU and PU have. BSU has traditionally been a teacher's college, and while it has many other strong programs, notably telecommunications and architecture, they aren't the areas that easily attract spin-off industries.

i think at this point BSU is the only thing keeping the city alive at all, alive, but just barely. the Ball Corporation for which the university was named left the city more than a decade ago. the city recently announced that they could no longer afford the electric bill to keep the street lights on. just the latest slip down the long slippery slope of decline. all that said, it's unlikely the state will disinvest in BSU any time soon, so Muncie is likely to limp on for the foreseeable future. but the mere presence of that institution will not be enough to keep the rest of the town alive indefinitely, let alone jumpstart a functioning economy.

Nick is right, that Ball State is not the economic engine for Muncie that it should be. Along with the Ball Memorial Hospital, it's the town's biggest employer and sits at the heart of the city. But I found it a strange place, isolated from the city, regarded with outright hostility by much of the town. Some people at Ball State are trying to break down these walls, but it's an uphill battle. As Nick points out, Muncie needs all the help it can get. Ball State should make it its mission to reach out to the city and work together to reinvent its economy.

The fact is that Ball State is all too typical of Midwestern colleges and universities. Too many Midwestern cities surround first-class colleges and universities that have virtually nothing to do with the towns around them. As these towns crumble, the schools hold themselves aloof, almost a caricature of the ivory tower. This is more true of private schools: unlike Ball State, most state universities make more of an effort to be involved in their communities.

It's difficult to imagine these smaller industrial cities disappearing any time soon. I can see them shrinking but eventually reaching some sort of population equilibrium. I recall looking at some information on Butte, Montana and how large it was. Butte was single-industry town built around mining. Yet it still survives, albeit at considerably smaller population. Perhaps a similar story for places like Srcanton and Wilkes-Barre PA. Perhaps once a place reaches a certain population threshold there is a certain inertia and drag mitigating demographic collapse and catastrophic "gold rush ghost town" depopulation is delayed by decades.

“Brain drain” is a term that has been popularized by the talking heads of the region to explain the loss of talent we’ve seen in Ohio. The approach is simple, since Ohio is lagging behind in terms of the high tech, “thinking” types of jobs; individuals leave the region to find these opportunities. While this seems like a logical conclusion, I think there is a more straightforward and painful reality, a reality that cuts to the very core of our human condition. Perhaps our problem is not so much brain drain, but “valued drain”.

People have a fundamental need to feel appreciated and valued for their contributions. Whether it’s in a family, a business, a school or a community. People want to know their thoughts count and matter, that their ideas are not dismissed at trivial or fool hearty. If someone does not feel like they matter, they can choose several alternatives; not getting involved, becoming apathetic, loosing interest and, eventually perhaps, leaving to find a place where they do feel valued.

What have we done to value people in Ohio? Specifically what have we done to engage the people between the ages of 18 and 50? I focus on this age range, as this is the core of Generation X and also Generation Y (and my age range, the upper end, wink). What steps have our leadership taken to really listen to what these people want? Do they even understand this generation? I am not sure they do.

Within the current conundrum of our regions struggle to redefine itself in this global era, there is, by and large, a propensity to remain at the status quo. A “this is the way it’s been done…” mentality…when someone does step up and say, “lets try this…” they are often looked upon as foolish and quickly dismissed as uninformed or too radical.

I hear elected officials such as county commissioners and town council members say, “get involved to make change”, sure, I’d buy that IF they would really allow the change to occur and not simply give it lip service. I know this personally as I HAVE gotten involved, I’ve TRIED to voice my opinion, give insight, even point people to data sources and regional resources. In return, I see…well, you likely know the answer to this.

What is causing this fear to change? Is it simply fear of the unknown? Is it fear of failure? The reality is that we have stigmatized failure on all fronts of our lives. If we do not have the perfect job, love life, social life, etc…we’ve obviously done something wrong. We run our schools, government and our businesses this way. Failure is evil…period. Sir Ken Robinson, a thinker in term of education and change said, "If you are not prepared to be wrong, you'll never produce anything original." We have forgotten this positive approach to being agents of change.

There are a lot of people who have great ideas within our own communities (and even our own homes). They desperately want to be heard and valued. Their voices are being ignored, obliterated in the windstorm of negativity, pessimism and fear. It’s time to hand over the mic and listen.

I see some light shining through the ruins of the Midwest. There is some freedom involved in living in a place that the rest of world no longer cares about. When you are given a grim prognosis by your doctor, you start to think big. You begin to do the things that you were once afraid to do. This doesn't mean you get another 50 years to live, but it means that you make the most of the time you've got, and I'm beginning to see this attitude here. I tell my friends from the Sun Belt that hard work is an export of the Midwest, it's in our DNA to roll up our sleeves, lace up our boots and get stuff done. I think for some of us who are still here, we have come to the acceptance stage of the grieving process and it's strangely liberating.

The Global Midwest Initiative of The Chicago Council on Global Affairs is a regional effort to promote interstate dialogue and to serve as a resource for those interested in the Midwest's ability to navigate today's global landscape.